(born in Dresden in 1932)
Abstract Painting (894–14), 2005, titled, signed, dated 894–14 Richter 2005 on the reverse, oil on Alu-Dibond, 30 x 44 cm, (PP)

Provenance:
Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
New York, Marian Goodman Gallery, Gerhard Richter: Abstract Paintings, 7 November 2009 – 9 January 2010, exh. cat. no. 8, ill.

Gerhard Richter’s Abstract Painting (894-14) makes his painterly process of the deliberate accident, typical for this group of works, comprehensible. The procedure for the emergence of the image is clearly recognizable – the richly applied oil paint scraped obliquely across the painting with a ‘squeegee’ – and at the same time paradoxically obscured. The structure of horizontally blurred lines and streaks of colour on the one hand testifies to the uncontrolled merging of the colours, their materiality and texture; on the other hand, it allows itself to be read as the result of an intentional composition. The palette of grey streaked through with colour, which is intermingled with light green on the lower border of the painting and at the side, imparts a feeling of calmness and harmony.

(…) the squeegee process becomes transparent as an operation at the extreme opposite end from what chance operations in the wake of the Surrealist legacies of automatism had still promised: starting the production of each canvas with strange rehearsals of various forms of gestural abstraction, as though moving through recitals of its legacies, in the final phases Richter seems literally to execute the painting with a massive device that rakes paint across an apparently carefully planned and painted surface. Criss-crossing the canvas horizontally and vertically with this rather crude tool, the artist accedes to a radical diminishment of tactile control and manual dexterity, suggesting that the erasure of painterly detail is as essential to the work’s production as the inscription of procedural traces. Thus an uncanny and deeply discomforting dialectic between enunciation and erasure occurs at the very core of the pictorial production process itself, opening up the insight that we might be witnessing a chasm of negation and destruction as much as the emergence of enchanting colouristic and structural vistas.
(Benjamin Buchloh, The Chance Ornament. Aphorisms on Gerhard Richter’s Abstractions, in: Artforum, February 2012, p. 173)

“It began in 1976 with small abstract pictures which allowed me to do all of those things I had previously forbidden myself to do: simply arbitrarily to put something down, in order then to realise that it can never be arbitrary. This happened in order to open a door for me. When I don’t know what is emerging there, that is, when I have no fixed image such as a photograph that I copy, then arbitrariness and accident play an important role.”
Gerhard Richter im Interview mit Sabine Schütz 1990 in: Gerhard Richter Text 1961 bis 2007. Schriften, Interviews, Briefe, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2008, p. 256.